City of Heroes/Villains is moving house. The super superhero MMO IP has been fully bought up by NCsoft, who formerly shared ownership with the games’ developer Cryptic. But unusually for a publisher buying a game from its developer, this doesn’t seem like it’s bad news at all.

NCsoft promse this signifies their continued interest in the games, with multi-year plans for their future, beyond continuing the free Issue updates (Issue 11 is coming soon). Employing wild speculation, you could see executive producer Brian Clayton’s words – “we can’t wait for the ‘City of’ community to see all that we have in store for them” – implying the possibility of a third City being added to the franchise. Or you could say he’s just abbreviating for the two existing games. Let’s pretend it’s the former, because that’s more fun. [Edit: Content And Community Manager, Stephen Reid, tells us that a third city isn’t very likely, but there are big plans for the existing locations]

NCsoft seem quite committed to the project. They’re opening a new California-based studio for the games, and it seems unlikely that players will notice much difference. And it leaves Cryptic free to work on their Marvel license MMO. Which is all enough to remind me to wake up my account and take Nitefall out on the battle of crime once more. Super-jump!

It’s quite a wierd occurance this because I always thought Cryptic was pretty much created by Matt Miller and this seems to suggest otherwise.

It also begs the question of “Why?” I always felt there was a conflict of interests going on with Cryptic developing an MMO for people that sued them that would directly compete with their own existing MMO.

Not that anybody seems to know anything about this Marvel MMO but the general buzz in the CoX community is one of mistrust because the art style and setting of CoX means you have a huge amount of flexibility in what you create as a hero and what the developers can do with it storywise.

Schizo: That’s why I always presumed that the Marvel MMO would have to be a very different approch to the Superhero Genre than City of Heroes. I mean, in the same way there’s no need for all fantasy games or sci-fi to have the same mechanics, there’s no need for all Superhero games.

(I always kinda presumed that the Marvel MMO would be for the consoles too, off a gut feeling.)

Going through what the Devs/Community liason folk have been saying in the forums, all the main players seem to have moved over, pretty much. So that’s good. Fingers crossed for the future.

Jack Emmert hasn’t been very involved with City Of X for a while now – Matt Miller has been the lead for a year or more and I believe Emmert has been the lead on the Marvel project at least since it was announce a year ago.

“The Hero Formerly Known As Statesman” or to be represented by this symbol “%&$^%!!!”

Inneresting news. It makes sense that it separates Cryptic and NCSoft re; the Marvel thing, but it makes me wonder that if the CoX team has moved to NCSoft, what’s Cryptic left with to work with? Was the Marvel team a completely separate entity? Which project is losing what part of their creative power?

Yes the Marvel team was completely seperate. The CoX team was only working on CoX, according to their forum posts.

The Heroes and Villains teams were much larger earlier on, so presumably there were numerous less visible members of staff who went off to work on the Marvel game/other projects in the last year or two.

Third ‘City’, John? Noooo, at least not in the sense of ‘City of Sidekicks’ (for instance). More stuff in the existing ‘City’ (and Isles)? Oh yes. Beyond that? Other stuff.

FYI all but one of the Cryptic staffers working on CoX made the move over to NC NorCal (the new studio). The only person who didn’t was a fairly new employee.

Cryptic has had a lot of people working on MUO for a long time, Jack Emmert included. The CoX ‘live’ team was small by comparison. With the new studio the number of people working on CoX is going to go up dramatically, which is great for a three year old game, really…. :)